![]() "Objects turn to relics before my eyes." Everything he sees means something else. "I learned to tolerate images rising in me like bruises," Jakob says. The reader is asked to accept that the novel's metaphorical style repeats the activity of a traumatised imagination, always pulled backwards. Nobody here can "move on", as our favoured cliché has it. "There was no energy of narrative in my family," says Ben, the novel's second (and second-generation) narrator. Afterbirth of earth." This characteristic syntax, in which an image or an association is presented as if it were its own explanation, is what has made many call Michaels's style "poetic" - whether in praise or, sometimes, in irritation. ![]() "Dripping with the prune-coloured juices of the peat-sweating bog. Recalling how he "squirmed from the marshy ground", Jakob's sentences lose their main verbs. There he finds the Greek geologist Athos, who will save him from the genocide. Eventually he wanders into the excavated city of Biskupin, an ancient site recovered from the river mud that had buried it for centuries. "Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city." The literal meaning of this peculiar sentence is soon clear enough: in hiding from the Nazis, seven-year-old Jakob, a Polish Jew, buries himself under the wet earth of the forest, emerging to forage only at night. ![]() ![]() ![]() One of the governing metaphors of Fugitive Pieces is introduced at its very opening. ![]()
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